If you ask me why I’m running for US senate, I’ll tell you: I’m running because I’m afraid. I’m afraid for my country, afraid for my people, afraid for my children. We are beginning a very long road, folks, we are setting out on a great downward trajectory, the likes of which we have not seen in our lifetimes, but which comes round for all in the end, over great stretches of time, so that no one ever sees it all in one lifetime. It is for many of us already a received inheritance, something we bore from our mothers and our fathers, their old-fashioned resentments, their primal prejudice. And it is a legacy we leave to our children. But when I go to the people and I ask them what they want, what they hope to get out of this great whirling disaster, do you know what they tell me? Blood, they say. We want the blood of the enemy. It’s them who divide us, who oppress us, who take what’s rightfully ours. Blood will satisfy us, it is the only thing that will. Like I said, I am frightened for my country. I’d like to tell you a story, and many of you in the audience have probably heard this one, or maybe you saw the movie, though I wouldn’t recommend it, I’ve heard it’s pretty terrible. Oh, have you seen it? What did you think? Yeah, no, I don’t like him either.

After I came out of the academy, I started flying F-16s with the 510th out at Aviano, Italy, and on the weekends, I would go into Trieste and work on my italian by playing cards with the locals. I lost a lot of money that spring, but my accent improved, though I’m a bit rusty these days. But as luck would have it, that was the spring all hell broke loose. The bombings began in sarajevo in april 1992. the bosnians, the croats and the serbs. Everyone called for blood. And so all hell broke loose, and nato was called in to enforce a no fly zone over bosnia. My unit was deployed, and that’s why I was up there in june of 1995, patrolling the skies.

On the ground, a Bosnian-Serb army 2K12 Kub surface-to-air missile battery near Mrkonjić Grad fired a missiles. It was a trap. They kept their missile radars off so we couldn’t detect them, and then they waited for a plane to fly directly overhead, where my warning systems were weakest. they fired two missiles. I got warning that they were coming my way, a loud emergency beep and flashing red lights, but it was dark, and I couldn’t see where I was going. The first missile exploded right outside the window, and the beauty of it took me by surprise, the second’s flash of warm light, and I thought that I’d missed it. That I had survived. But the second missile was a direct hit, and the hole plane split in two, and the seconds melted away as I went from flying by at transonic speeds to free falling into the air. I had only a second before I might pass out from the shock. I pulled the cord on my parachute and fell asleep mid-air.

One minute you’re the king falcon, lord of the skies. You’re the only thing you see for miles, and everything in the sky stands in direct relation to everything else. There are no buildings, no street grids, no sniper rifles, no urban combat, no guerilla warfare, no asymmetrical warfare. When the enemy arrives, it’s not wearing a uniform or emerging slowly from a hospital. It does not get swallowed by an overwhelming context you can’t pick apart. It’s clear. The whole thing is just so clear.

Cut to: nearly a week later, I set off a flare from among the ancient trees of the sutjeska, straight into an open, rocky pasture. It works, and six aircraft circle round and I am dashing, running, limping, into the clearing. I am sick, I am injured, I am malnourished and dehydrated. From out of the night sky, twenty marines fall like dark angels, crashing to the ground beneath the gunships’s floodlights. High above, I hear the fluttering of sea stallions. They form a perimeter around me, the sound is penetrating my ears, and one of the marines grabs me because I can hardly stand. He says he’s got me and calls me brother, and we ascend. We’re lightning fast, and wind and rain splash against my face. When I’m pulled into the helicopter, I’m welcomed by three paramedics who immediately take my vitals, ask my questions, perform little tests. But I am fine, despite how I look. The leg is otherwise set and healed. Despite it all, I had been well taken care of. I thank everyone for their concern and tell them I’m okay, but I’d really like something to eat and to rest. Everyone settles in as we head back to base. Settled next to me is a handsome marine by the name of kiyan who looks me dead in the eye moments before I fall asleep and asks, ‘what was it like behind enemy lines?’ I don’t remember what I told him in those moments before sleep took me, but I’ve never forgotten the question. I dreamed of the ditch I dug out there, somewhere in the sutjeska wilds, and I dreamed of the body I’d put in it.

During the week I spent behind enemy lines, I made two friends. The first was an old man, a very very old man, who spoke a broken italian—not much better than mine--in a thick, deep voice that coiled around the ears like coarse rope. I’d a shattered leg in a splint and the crutch the old man had fashioned me from a slab of black pine lay across the room. The old man took advantage of the situation, and set to me all manner of questions about the great world beyond which he’d ceased to know:

• who is this milošević you speak of, and why does he hate his countrymen so?

• what kind of nation is this nay-toe, is it a great power or a small one?

• How could europe be united? United around what? Or perhaps against what…?

• Whatever happened to once mighty russia? And what was a 'soviet' anyway?

• what kind of wars were fought without blood, and were not all wars both hold and cold at once?

  
  

I built a centuries worth of concepts up from scratch, cobbled them together from stray pine cones on the floor, a sprinkling of dirt and some water to make it stick. It was amusing, in its way. A game we played. He would ask an impossible question and I would attempt to explain the post-cold war global order with tinker toys and paper clips. He was patient with me, and laughed warmly when he did not understand what I was saying. His lips pursed and ached to stretch into a smile, but his eyes were lively, gray and windswept. He made us batches of green tea over a wood fire, and he would talk to me as long as I was awake.

I have no enemies, I remember he said to me, and he wagged his twisted finger in the air and laughed. you cannot foist them on me. Others have tried, all have failed.

You see, I was unconscious as my parachute descended to the tree line, and was woken by my left leg slamming against a tree branch at a rate of forty miles an hour. I cried out in the dark, and scrambled for purchase, hardly knowing which way was up. searching for the moon and stars, I found neither, and by miracle alone, I wrapped myself around a tree trunk and held on long enough for the parachute to melt into the canopy. From there, I lowered myself down, using my right leg to balance along the branches, ultimately collapsing at the base of an ancient tree. That was the first night.

I’ll come back to the second night.

The third night a storm came rolling in, and the runoff swept down the hillside and nearly washed me away. I’d have to move, so I grabbed a wet log and used it as a makeshift crutch as I made my way to higher ground. The forests of the sutjeska are old-growth, so the floor is littered with clumsy wood debris. I remember the storm broke in through holes in the canopy and dumped oceans into the underbrush.

It was impossible to see anything, and I’d hardly a box of matches to light the way, so I’d take three steps forward before the wind would slap me across the face or the rain would spit at me, the sutjeska rebuked me as a hostile enemy, as an invasive enemy disrupting the gentle, undisturbed ecological balance. And in a way, they were right. I heard the bellows and scampering of animals in the near distance, were it not for the minor inconveniences of the rain and the storm, they might have eaten me.

I carried on like this for miles, thankful for the tree line to spare me a lightning strike, but unable to find shelter out of the rain. And the temperatures were plummeting and soon my wet clothes would catch me pneumonia and then I’d be, forgive the expression, royally screwed.

It started off as a sniffle, then a cough, and what might have enveloped me over a week was driven on by the winds, the rain, and the dark to all but consume me within the span of an hour or two. A fever came upon me, trying to sleep against a rock beneath my jacket. I lost my appetite. I vomited over a cliff and grew dizzy looking over the edge. I only prayed the splint around my leg would hold out a little longer. I began to grow delirious, tortured dreamscapes slotted themelves in and suddenly it was lights out at the academy and I sleeping on the top bunk, the ceiling within fingers reach, or I was walking the empty halls of my baltimore high school, expecting marco or toddy to pop up around the corner. But no one was there, no one was anywhere, and it occurred to me at moments when the rain or the wind would let up, that yes, there was a higher than likely chance that I would die out here.

You see, I do not believe in chance anymore. I do not believe in the randomness of the universe. I can’t. I am not allowed. I’m not saying it isn’t true. For every miracle there unfold a million scenes of unremarked disaster. All I am saying is that in the moment, it is hard to know if its luck or a miracle, whether you’ve stumbled into the right corner of the multiverse or if someone’s guiding you, beside you, looking out for you.

At first the dim light was the only thing I could make out in the dark. It cut through everything, like a flickering star, signaling some hidden away galaxy, a whole cluster of planets and peoples. Everything was in that star.

My attention had been divided, assaulted really, and it took a moment for all the pieces of my mind to reintegrate themselves, for it all to come into focus. And my tiring limp suddenly picked up a little speed, and before you know it I was hobbling onward, grunting as I went, and the sound of the rain retreated, and the winds changed, bringing warmth and the smell of flowers and longgrass up from the south.

And soon the light in the far away distance grew near and warm, and I knew that it was fire. There was someone out there, or else lightning struck a nearby tree, in case I would die warm at least.

I came near enough to be heard and so I stopped to survey the scene. Up ahead was the open door of a small pit-house, dug square into the earth and covered over with a thatching of cat tail, water reed and rush.

I crept in like a fieldmouse, so stunned I never bothered to pull my firearm. I stood about three feet out from the door when I called out.

Hello, I said, is anybody in there? I asked once in english and then again in italian, because I did not know how in serbian.

Hearing no answer, I side-winded my way to the door. I could hear the fire crackling and for the first time now feel its warmth.

So I stuck my head inside, and that’s when the old man hit me in the face with the cast iron skillet.

I felt like an orange fruit peeled from its skin, tender flesh exposed and unraveling. He hit me so hard I spun around in a circle before collapsing on a small flight of stairs and sliding down to the floor. I landed on my back which cracked and spasmed.

I cried out.  There was a ringing in my ears, and for a few seconds, I thought I had gone blind in my left eye.

As my vision returned and the ringing subsided, I spotted the old man still at the top of the stairs. The old man had dropped the pan on the floor. He did not have the strength to pick it up twice, but not wanting to take any chances, I threw myself up off the floor and directly at him. Nothing as coordinated as a punch or a roundhouse kick to the throat, more like a soggy mess of human.

He was small though, and not much was required. The weight of me knocked him backwards, and had the door not been right behind him, he might have fallen and broken his tiny head open. Instead my weary bones pinned him for a moment back against the door. This produced from him a tiny fart, like the rumblings of a guinea pig. The old man burst with laughter and I could see for the first time that he’d hardly any teeth left. He was bald and his whole scalp drooped over his forehead like a bulldog’s so that even when laughing, he looked ferocious and angry.

But I was not amused. I pulled my gun out and pointed it directly in his face. He fell back again, frightened, his little arms pulled themselves up to his chest and his bottom jaw shook like a skeletons. He had not expected this. Suddenly I had the upper hand and I’m not going to lie, it felt mighty nice. For once now being on top of things, of having a definite say in stuff, I was master of my fate again.

Nobody move, I screamed, unsure if there were others I couldn’t see. The stairs led downward into a pit the size of my daughter’s first grade classroom. I peered into the dark corners. A fire burned in a stone pit in the center of the room, and the ceilings sloped down to the floor so you had to crouch as you walked into shadow.

There were no windows and no other doors, and it smelled—not bad per se, though certainly well-lived. They—whoever they were—had built it into the nearby hillside who knows how long ago, though it had taken time and dedication and would have been risky and at times disastrous in outcome.

Yet here it was, a marvel of nature, the height of sutjeskan civilization, and yet barely a notch on the evolutionary ladder: primitive grinding devices, a stone pit fire with scrap iron chimney, damp thatched bedding. But a warbler sung from a twig cage held on one of two mighty beech posts, and the shape of the room drew your eyes skyward to the pitched high gothic ceiling.

I’ll admit to you here and now that I regretted scaring the old man as I did, though once I had done so, it was hard to walk back. I shattered a foundational trust between us in a matter of minutes. I made the old man fart, and that fart was a toxic smoke bomb which filled the room with fear and mistrust, and it would take a moment to clear out the pit we found ourselves in.

The old man sensed my heart wasn’t in my impromptu home invasion. He made no qualms in rolling his eyes at me as I shouted orders for him to move at gunpoint to the solo stool at the far corner of the room. He hobbled over, limping on one leg but otherwise without need of a cane. I hollered a bit in english, but he did not respond. And when I tried my limited serbian, the old man smiled as though to laugh, though no sound every emerged. So I took a gamble: Parli italiano? The old man’s face contorted as if it were collapsed and pulled inward at the nose. Si, he confessed, lo parlo.

From my busted italian, cobbled together over many nights of drunken cards, I asked him where he had come from, how he had come to live alone in the middle of the sutjeska, how long he had been out here by himself. The rain had begun to subside and a cool breeze trellised around the stairs and fell to the floor where it ruffled the fire, the dust, the years of debris.

I had not lowered my weapon at this point, and so the old man sat silent and still. He would give me nothing until I disarmed, so I made one final inspection of the room before lowering my pistol and holstering it at my side. Where am I? I asked.

You are in the deepest woods, the old man explained. There are few points relevant to it, none that you would understand or recognize. You are about one hundred meters from the rocks on which I wash my clothes. And you are about two hundred meters from the place I set the hare traps, perhaps three hundred meters from where I buried mattia, you are a league away from the mountain top where we died. This geography means little to you, though I do not know how else to orient you. You are lost, that much is clear. Though you already know that.

I dared not fall asleep nor could I bring myself to go outside again. I asked the man if he’d any water to drink or food to eat.

Will you shoot me if I do not give it to you? He asked.

If shooting you would give me strength, I would consider it, I said. It was a joke, though a bit worn for wear once it had climbed through and under the barbed barriers of language.

Anyway, the old man did not find it especially funny. He sighed with his whole little body before crossing the room to a large chest of wood which he opened and inside revealed some berries, nuts, some wild mushrooms. He made me a small plate and gestured to the front door where a water basin sat out collecting water.

He sat back down and watched quietly as I ate my food. 

Against the south wall was a long row of firewood, twigs and kindle, and tried to make myself useful by throwing them into the fire when it started to burn down.

An hour passed of us in silence. An hour of nothing, and then:

I cannot say for certain how old I am or how long I have been out here, though my best guess leads me to believe that I am nearing one hundred and forty and that this is my one hundred and seventeenth summer here in the sutjeska.

Naturally I assumed the old man crazy or prone to bouts of exaggeration or suffering from a severe deterioration in his faculties. Perhaps he enjoyed playing tricks on a strange foreigner. Perhaps he was biding time, distracting me and folding me into the warmth of the fire, its muffled crackle, its smoked essence. Tell me, father, what year were you born?

I expected an equivocation, some stumbling about with facts and figures. A polite deferral. But instead I got an answer almost instantly: 1855.

I was born in the sanjak of travnik during the days of ottoman rule. My family were poor raiyah…how do you say? We were…surfs. Peasants. We owned sheep and walked them through the hills. We were not rich folk. My fathers and brothers lived short, hard lives. Istanbul was far away, and the sultan, he did not have much say over the the beys and aghas who ruled here at home with swords and whips. They stole what they wanted and were judged by no one. They were jungle cats, and might eat you, if they wanted, if they thought to.

He confided that his family had come from a small little village outside sarajevo, and that he remembered the day his father and brother took up against the turks. He said he begged his mother to let him go, that it was his destiny to die with them and Jovan Gutić on the Gradac hill north of Krekovi. But then neither came back alive, and his mother fell into a sadness so deep, it ‘swallowed her,’ he said, ‘like a bear.’

He said he did not wish to fight after this, and instead spent the rest of the summer escorting unarmed men, women and children through the primeval forests, traveling at night, switchbacking the mountain pathways in search of water, ruffling through the underbrush.

It was there, he said, that he met an italian. Acciai was his name, and he had been a university student in padua before joining with garibaldi. He said he came as a christian brother to free us from the turks. They became lovers, he confessed, and their affection for one another grew greatly that summer, leading their people to the border and to life.

But then came the summer of ‘78. The ottomans have lost the great eastern crisis, and they will be forced to surrender their balkan holdings to the western powers. However, the europeans did not believe in the cause of bosnian and herzegovine independence, and instead leveraged their nation in a game of real politik. Bosnia and herzegovina were given over to the austro-hungarians, so that france could spit in the russian alexander’s face. The austro-hungarians marched into sarajevo in august of that year. The violence on the streets was vicious, guns, bricks, electrical wire, rakes, baseball bats, clubs, knives. He and acciai packed a bag between them and fled to the woods. It was my twenty-third year, he said.

From there, he said, the couple largely fell out of time. His words, not mine. They dug irrigation ditches, they grew food, when they could be dragged in off the mountains, they’d keep goats. At first they spoke incessantly of the homes they had known as children, their mother’s voices, the schools with the desks under which they’d carved their names. They wondered aloud to one another if they might not some day return and find it there still. But then they’d turn the bend in the river, and the need to leave would drift away from them.

And then years went by, years then decades, and at one point they’d realized they’d lived longer in the woods than they had in the cities, and from that point on, there grew less and less to discuss of the lives they had once known, the lives which to them were foreign, strange, a butterfly’s discarded chrysalis. They forgot words, big words, all the words acciai claimed he learned in university. They communicated less with words than with fingers, eyebrows, hair, lips, teeth, elbows, heels. They communicated with everything around them, everything in the forest became just another extension of their reach. In time they forgot their names. At which point acciai died.

And then years went by, years then decades, and at one point he’d realized he’d lived longer in the woods alone than he’d lived in the woods with acciai. And in time all the varied things he had come to know about his one great love were lost. He no longer remembered the name of the town in which acciai had been baptized or of the priest who christened him. He could not remember his favorite color or the song he would sing while chopping wood. In the end, the old man told me, he has only a tender memory of the face, and even that is smudged, fuzzy, unclear. We leave everything somewhere, the old man laughed, and touched his finger to the end of his nose.

And yet, I challenged, you told me the name of the village from which you were born. You told me your father and brother fought with Jovan Gutić on the Gradac hill north of Krekovi. You told me the name of the family you helped who invited you to Podgorica to spend the holidays. The old man smiled, twisting his tiny fingers into the hairs of his thin, white beard. I have told the story too many times for it not to be true. Though at this point, I cannot say that it is. Only that I have told it more than once before.

I did not know what to say in response to the old man’s story. What would he do with the epilogue? I wondered. Decades after fleeing, a young yugoslav nationalist, Gavrilo Princip, also protested the austro-hungarian occupation—then past its thirty-fifth year—by shooting twice into the carriage of the archduke ferdinand. The archduke and his wife were en route to a local hospital where they to visit the victims of an earlier failed assassination attempt by princip and his comrades. A miscommunication between the attendant general and the driver on the direction forced them to pull over in front of sarajevo’s favorite serbian delicatessen, pulling over forced the engine to stall, and by a single shimmering grace of fortune, the engine stalled right in front of the would-be assassin princip, a sandwich still in his hand. The mark had delivered itself to him. How could he not shoot?

The old man knew none of this, but I detected the straight line that connected me to him, back through time and history, to the birth of the modern world. Modernity, in many ways, was born from the pressure cooker of yugoslav nationalism which in time would turn  geopolitical realities for an endless succession of great powers: ottomans, austro-hungarians, soviets, russians, americans. And yet none of this meant anything to him. It was someone else’s story, someone else’s history. It was as if I and everything I knew or would ever know stood inside a single room, and I was trying to imagine the person who stood outside that room, trying to make sense of what he saw looking in.

The old man warmed the soup he had cooking on the fire, and he handed me branches so that I could set my leg. he told me the places he and acciai used to go hunting for boar together. they would be gone for a week at a time, sleeping out in the woods often in the cold and the rain, listening for boar. he told me jokes about boars, most of them focused on the ugliness or stupidity of boars. boars to him were more than food, they were a whole kind of person, with social habits and personalities. a boar was funny or serious, playful or angry, sharp or lazy.

i crash landed into a dry and arid forest and stumbled about in the dark, finding no one and nothing anywhere. yet the old man left his tiny house and knew himself surrounded by beings, slow ones, fast ones, thick ones, thin ones, large ones, small ones. the old man felt himself no less a member of society than me.

when the soup was warm, the old man handed me a bowl along with a spoon freshly carved from the beech trees. he waited a moment for me to try it. it was thin but of motley flavor, wild flowers and grasses, with all the spices of the damp earth. more than that, it was hot, and i devoured it.

many years ago, the old man said, too many to count, a great battle erupted not too far from here in the canyon valley. birds of war dropped fire and gunpowder from the sky and it shook the ground beneath our feet. it was late spring. acciai and i planned to pick the berries that grew wild in the valley along the river, but instead watched quietly from the tree line as young boys in tattered green trudged with blank faces through the mud and debris. there language was serbian and it was familiar to me still, though also not, an old song i once knew perhaps passed through a half century of variations. we understood their expressions of fear and hunger, but then they would say things we did not understand, and so we fell back further into the treeline.

the old man had witnessed the battle of the sutjeska, fought between yugoslav communist partisans and the nazi germans. this would have been ‘43 or perhaps ‘44. though he had not sense of what a communist was, what a yugoslav was, what a nazi was. the whole of the second world war which had defined a world was to him a peripheral matter. and how could i say he was wrong in that?

i spent another two days with the old man, though we did little talking after that first day. there was little common between us. i was an american, he a sometimes serbian nationalist. his sense of the world was a century’s removed from mine. we hardly spoke the same languages. we shared none of the same references. we instead played elaborate board games that he had built over the years, using pieces of shaved sandstone and wood. we sat in silence in his little pit house, lacking nothing, needing nothing, going no where.

on the third day, i heard the choppers flying over head, and i ran to meet them. the old man did not follow me into the clearing, but instead watched from the tree line as i—like so many before me—passed away from sight.

i think often of the old man these days. it feels sometimes as though we are prisoners of history, strapped to a rocket blasted into outer space or to a roller coaster we know derails once it hits the peak. though perhaps we clamor for blood and the domination of our enemies because we follow too closely, watch too much, know too much. but in the words of the buddhist monk yoshida kenkō, knowledge deceives us. it binds us to the wheel, everything we think we know about one another, their intentions, their designs on us. these are passing illusions, but an illusion taken as real reinforces itself through our actions. we build institutions around these illusions, we fight wars for them, we perpetuate prejudice and hatred in their names.

the old man gave up his name, his home, any chance for fame, wealth or posterity. i am perhaps the only man alive who knows his face, and even i cannot tell you where he is buried, assuming he is not still alive somewhere in those primeval forests, hunting boars and picking berries, standing idly by as younger persons trudge aimlessly into history and death.